The present invention relates to the making available of services, in particular, vis-à-vis audio and/or video content, in a communication network.
Equipment, for example audiovisual equipment, such as STB (set top box) devices or HDDs (hard disk drives), may be interconnected by a communication network, e.g., domestic. Interconnecting such equipment by means of a communication network makes it possible, in particular, to share the hardware resources of the equipment and gives flexibility in the use of the equipment.
Solutions are known for creating a pool of hardware resources that can be presented to a user so as to be able to use services, at the system level, while benefiting from the communication network.
From a user point of view, it is not wished to have to manage directly a tuner, a hard disk drive or other hardware resource. It is wished only to view a content, to make a recording, etc., that is to say to carry out an action or a series of actions that is coherent at the system level and provides a user result by means of simple commands without complex programming or configuration. The communication system consisting of all this equipment must thus offer services allowing this.
It is desirable to overcome these drawbacks of the prior art. It is thus desirable, in such a context, to share hardware resources while masking the complexity of the configuration of management thereof. It is also desirable in such a context to make it possible to offer, to one or more users, services that are coherent at the system level, and which mask the complexity of configuration and management of the hardware resources while offering an open-ended solution when new types of hardware resources appear.